Growing up I learned about what allegedly happened on this day in history and asked myself, "So what's so good about it?" It seemed silly to call a day "good" on which somebody was put to death in such a horrific way. Granted, it is a necessary event to the big one that follows - Easter - but it all just seemed a bit bizarre to me.
Of course, being young and, well, more ignorant than I am now, there were a lot of things I didn't know. And one of these things is that over time, words simply change and shift their meanings. We tend to think that our language is however it is, at whatever time we speak, read, and write it, but there are times in which it changes more rapidly than others (like now, for example, with the rapid and broad-based influx of English words into German, for example) and there are times when it changes very, very slowly (for example over the couple of hundred years that it took, say, "awful" and "awesome" to literally exchange meanings). The bottom line is, though, that language changes all the time. Trying to stop it from changing is like trying to hold back the tide with your hands. This is very bothersome to some people, but I haven't yet figured out why.
The "good" in Good Friday is one of those words. There was a time when it meant more than it does today. It included meanings such as "pious" and, particularly relevant here, "holy". But, most of us don't know that anymore, and a growing number of people don't care, as long as they get their holiday; that is, a day, or perhaps only half-a-day, off work. Holidays are simply no longer "Holy Days", and it would seem than not much of anything is holy anymore.
This is really too bad. Oh, I know, some really terrible things have been done to our fellow humans beings in the name of things considered "holy". What one person reveres as holy, another thinks is a silly superstition, or as mundane as things can be. I don't think we have to agree on what is or what isn't holy, but there are times when I think that thinking something is holy isn't a bad idea.
The word has negative connotations for some, I know, but all religiously and spiritually tinged words do, but what is at stake is really the acknowledgement that there just might be something that we could all agree is worth striving to uphold or protect or that we could agree is actually priceless; that is, not "without price" but "beyond price", beyond what money could possibly buy, even if we wanted to.
In thinking about this, I became dismayed that I wasn't able to identify anything that all of us could agree on. We've come to a time in which there are significantly large groups of people in various places, who, for various reasons, believe that anything can be bought and sold. This was a sad realization. Maybe I just didn't think about it long enough, or hard enough, or clearly enough, even though I think I did. Maybe I've overlooked something, and if I have, do let me know. In the meantime, I'll just have to muddle along with the consequences of knowing that no matter what it is, someone somewhere is probably willing to pay money for it. How sad can you get?
No comments:
Post a Comment